Maybe you could modify the build rules to cat the test logs in case of
failure?

Turning on debug for everything would create *HUGE* log files.
Probably too big for routine use. That is why it is off by default.

It can be good to get an outside perspective sometimes. While that *was*
true, when the tests were reorganized a little while back things changed
so that the VERBOSE output is only triggered when a test fails, and
there's no reason not to use that by default anymore. New build logs:

not working on mips (at least on the buildd). The manual build I ran on
casals didn't have that problem (though it did have the issue with touch
complaining about unknown error codes). Are those problems related? I
can't think of any good reason why something this basic would fail on
mips (and mipsel) and work on all of our other debian archs.
(Historically, the tests are more likely to turn up wacky corner cases
in numeric calculations than problems with rm removing things.)
I'm also at a loss on how to proceed. Can anyone with a mips duplicate
this with a manual build? I suppose I could start sticking strace's into
the test scripts to get a better idea of why this is failing, but that
seems awful hard on the buildd network...

And before I really drive myself nuts over this, are there any known
issues that someone can say "oh yeah, that would be because of..."?